“do not go gentle into that good night / rage rage against the dying of the light”

A South African reporting quirk: the cell phone number. People have no qualms about giving it out. They will give you their work cell, their private cell, their boss’s cell, their cleaning lady’s cell, and pretty much any other cell they know of. I’m pretty sure that all of the above would be considered invasions of privacy in the US but now that I’ve grown accustomed to collecting 50 cell phone numbers a day, not to mention enjoying immensely the absolute convenience of being able to reach whomever whenever — it’s always free to take incoming calls — I can’t remember what it was like back home.

No phones are locked to any network and you can change numbers at will by getting a new SIM card — useful when traveling to neighboring countries or disposing of crime accessories. If a number has not been used for a month it’s automatically canceled and recycled into the matrix. There’s no location-specific area codes either when it comes to cell phone numbers (though there are for land lines).

And by the way everyone has a cell phone. Some have two. Every single refugee I’ve ever interviewed has had a cell phone number. Once I called an official back and it went straight to an operator message saying, “This number does not exist.” Turned out he sometimes programed it that way. A rather harsh alternative to turning off your cell, hey?

Four weeks into the internship, I’ve come to observe some differences between reporting in South Africa and back in the US.

For one, editors here rarely interfere with what a reporter turns in. Though copy editors take far more liberties in editing a story than would happen back home, reporters enjoy an enormous amount of freedom when it comes to what they write.

Reporting and writing are inextricable to a certain extent, but it seems like going out and getting the information is more important than how it’s written up.

The upside-down pyramid structure, ledes, nut grafs, etc. — all the things we were drilled on in newswriting last year — never referred to by name.

I’m keeping a tally on the day’s most read, most emailed and most blogged lists on the LAT and NYT websites.

Eventually we’ll check “the people’s stories” against the importance accorded to them by editors … and see what the correlation is, if any.

So what kinds of stories do people read and email and blog about?

The list is dominated by U.S. political news (mostly the election), opinion pieces (most of them on the former category) and business news (particularly big picture pieces on the U.S. economy). There’s little (but some) on Iraq. And a few stories that deal with our daily lives (email tsunami, for example).